“Followers of the sea more than the people of any other place in America before the Revolution, the men of Boston could not but return, in the general restoring of normal conditions, to their interest in maritime affairs. How could it be otherwise?”
“At their very feet lay the inviting bay, with its best of harbors, safe from the sea, of which it is less an arm than a shoulder. At their very doors lay all the materials for ship building. (The) Constitution, finished in 1797, was a home made vessel”.
“With the coming of peace (following the Revolutionary War) it might have been expected that the doors of commerce would be thrown immediately open. Yet it would have been hardly human for the mother country to smooth any paths for the child that had cast off all parental authority.”
“The British West India trade was of course subject to English legislation. It was not long before the merchants of Boston, as of all our ports, found themselves forbidden to bring their fish to the islands or to carry the island products to England.”
“These products, if brought first to New England, could not even be carried to England in British ships. This prohibition was followed in 1784 by that of exporting anything from the West Indies to the United States except in British vessels.”
“Here the citizens of Boston asserted themselves, and entered as of old into agreement to buy none of the wares so imported.”
“The Massachusetts legislature passed measures of retaliation; and the national laws of navigation and commerce reflected for some years the British policy of restriction.”
“If success is determined by obstacles, the commercial enterprise of Boston could not have had a more favorable beginning. Not content with the difficulties nearest home, the merchants of America, in the earliest days of peace, began turning their eyes to the distant trade of China.”
“To New York belongs the credit of sending out the first vessel in this trade, the Empress of the Seas, which set sail for Canton in February of 1784, and was back in New York in May of the next year.”
“Her supercargo was a Boston youth of twenty, Samuel Shaw by name, whose service on General Knox’s staff in the Revolution had already won him the rank of major.”
“In his journal of the outward voyage he tells of landing at St. Jago, an island of the Cape de Verde group. The officer of the port was a Portuguese.”
“‘On telling him,’ says Shaw, ‘by the interpreter, a negro, that we were Americans, he discovered great satisfaction, and exclaimed, with an air of pleasure and surprise, “Bostonian! Bostonian!”’”
“With this – and the Boston supercargo – to remember, the New England town may comfortably orient herself with the first of the Chinese traders.”
“It was not long, however, before the town could claim as her own a commercial venture of the first importance and magnitude. The journals of Captain Cook, the navigator, were published in 1784. Through them the great possibilities of the fur trade on the northwest coast of America were made known.”
“Five Boston merchants, including the Bulfinch whose architecture still dominates the local landscape, and one merchant of New York, joined themselves to enter this new field.”
“The vessels they secured for the expedition were two: the Columbia, a full rigged ship of two hundred and twelve tons, eighty-three feet in length; and the Washington, a sloop of ninety tons.”
“Let those who dread six days of the Atlantic on liners of fifteen thousand tons’ burden stop a moment and picture these cockleshells – as they must appear to-day – and the spirit of the men who embarked in them for the North Pacific, and – in the Columbia – for the complete circling of the globe.”
“Before they set sail, September 30, 1787, they provided themselves plentifully with silver, bronze, and pewter medals commemorating the expedition, and with useful tools and useless trinkets, jews’-harps, snuff-boxes, and the like. Rounding the Horn, and sailing northward, it was the little Washington which first reached the northwest coast.”
“While waiting for the Columbia, the sloop’s crew had an encounter with natives who gave them good reason to call their anchorage ‘Murderers’ Harbor.’”
“Then the Columbia came, with scurvy on board. But the cargo of furs was secured, and, in pursuance of the owners’ plan, was carried to Canton for sale.”
“Stopping on the way at Hawaii, Captain Gray took on board the Columbia a young chief, Attoo, promising to send him back from Boston as soon as might be.”
“From China the ship, loaded with teas, sailed for home by way of the Cape of Good Hope. In August of 1790 she dropped anchor in Boston harbor, the first American vessel to circumnavigate the earth.” (Howe; The Atlantic Monthly, 1903)
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